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Application Scripting

I haven't done application scripting for quite sometime but there is some points I need to document so I don't forget them.

1.) iexpress.exe - Built in EXE packager to all windows products. This allows the inclusion of any number of files into a Cabinet container with an exe and a SED file to allow application deployment.2.) batch file recording - "%~dp0(file name)" allows UNC path names to be used in a .bat file. More research is needed.

Ever wanted a way to ping an entire subnet and don't have access to a tool to do it? Well this one liner allows that.

The For at the beginning says the variable $i is equal to one, the semicolon separates it from the amount of times the loop is run 1..254 and then the $i++ increments the loop by 1. (You can specify every 5th IP if you want)

The next section runs the windows builtin ping.exe command (make sure you include the .EXE extension) with the switch -n (which means number of times) and then in brackets you are specifying the IP to ping. The where statement at the end is looking for a match of "bytes=32" default output for a successful ping.

I was working with VMware Update Manager and was running a scan on the entire VMguest infrastructure. Well the Update Manager service hung. I am not going to say anything more about that. :)

So I went to the UM server and attempted to restart the service. It sat in stop pending for quite awhile so I decided to kill the process. hmmm how do I do that? I was going to use powershell but the only cmdlet's available are to get- and stop- and restart-. All in the same token as going through the GUI.

Tasklist.exe /SVC
This displays all of the services running and their PID

Taskkill.exe /PID <PID #> /T
This terminates the service and child processes.

This killed the Update Scan on the VIclient and allowed me to restart the service.